Mowat Ralston Untalan : Soundings, 110 Church Gallery

“Sounding refers to a mechanism of probing the environment by sending out some kind of stimulus. The term comes from the ancient practice of determining the depth of water by feeding out a line with a weight at the end — making a sounding.” – 110 Church Gallery

Soundings is the title of the pen and ink drawing that anchors the installation of drawings, suspended sculpture and sound design. The mood of the room changes as the light changes casting moving shadows like their own kind of drawing. The drawing is consistent with Stella Untalan’s artworks, using cycles, repetition and simple mark making. In the past she created a drawing a day on her smart phone and then printed them all out, being consistent and process driven captures enigmatic moments that may otherwise be lost. The drawing is strict and specific in it’s ritualistic process revealing an undulating waviness along the rows of tiny stripes of ink, the image is wider than my field of vision. The rope installation hanging from the ceiling echoes the watery blue of the drawings evoking a sense of being by the docks at the river.

“With this, the drawings are kind of static elements to it, they change, not as dramatically but it’s like the whole space changes because of the light and shadow from the sculptural piece. And I think that this looks bigger and smaller depending on what the light is sometimes. It still sort of stuns me. It’s done with steel nibs. I was looking at this wonderful pen the other day with a flexible nib, piston loading pen and stuff like that, I like them but they’re like $140 a piece. But what happened with this one, I had found on the web, don’t ask me how, searching for pens, these steel nibs, they’re Esterbrook’s, manufactured in 1940, the box had never been opened before.

It has like 100 of them, a full box. I was like, ‘Well, you know, how much is that? Maybe I’ll get them.’ So I got them and that spurred me doing a bunch of drawings that are related to this one. I was putting them on facebook and Brian Dennis was like, ‘Stel. You need to make a big one of them.’ I said I would if I could figure out how to hang it. And he said he would help me.”

“The actual mechanisms he and I talked about just a little, we tossed around some ideas of fasteners and things, but, he and Keith hang things for people all the time in awkward places. So we worked out a way to build a platform over the stairs so we could walk the piece across and adhere it. It’s hung with magnets. We worked out a whole method for the depth of the screws, marking a plumb line. They have some ways of installing stuff and I have ways that I measure and when we combined the two it was really pretty exciting.

The drawing is on drafting film. I didn’t use Yupo because it could too easily be wiped off, this has a surface that accepts the ink. With this I wanted to make sure the ink wasn’t going to flake or pop off. And it also let me make something this long. The sheet is about eighteen feet and the drawing is fifteen seven. Like everything with Soundings, it’s about marking distance, measuring distance. It’s about making the mark and the line, measuring the distance from one mark I make to the next. Measuring the distance that when I dip the pen how long the ink will last. Because it’s all one color. It’s all one color from one inkwell. That whole part of it is one thing and it creates this whole rhythm. It’s really interesting because you can look at some of them and think, ‘Wow.’, the ink lasted a lot longer on this line. Sometimes the area is shorter, like the light blue, really I’m trying to make the same pressure each time for the same distance.

I don’t have any grid to tell me where to draw, there are times when I would draw and it seemed like it would go on forever. The ink sits on the drafting film in the same way, so I think some of it is…in the beginning I was making the marks a lot closer. Because I was trying to find the first lines, to be able to move across the sheet. After they were set, I was able to pace myself a little better.”

“I’m not really concentrating on the peripheral, so they move around, they have different spacing and I think the ink lasted longer on days that were more humid. The drafting paper doesn’t really absorb, it has these little crevices that the ink falls in, when there is a lot of moisture it sits up more. I did the rows left to right, always. I’d finish a line then walk all the way back and do the next line.

Originally I worked on it in sections, about five feet, but I was afraid it wouldn’t get done in time so I worked out a process because with the drafting film I have to wait for the ink to dry, that could take two hours. So I laid it all out. This is indigo ink but it’s acrylic and dries a little faster, when you walk next to them they shimmer.”

There will be a limited number of spaces for this performance. Please use the ticket link in this invite.

Lesley Tao Mowat inhabits a world of sound, creating music from both listening and seeing with heightened awareness. Her past includes creating sound art in a rock band and creating visual art in the pioneer days of new media. She holds an MFA in Computer Art from The School of Visual Arts (SVA).

With Drumflower, Lesley Tao helps people experience the joy and healing effect of self-expression through the creativity that is in each of us. Lesley Tao’s greatest love and inspiration is Mother Earth’s Web of Life and The Spirit That Lives In All Things.

Heavybubble is proud to present soundings at 110 CHURCH gallery. The exhibition includes drawings by Stella Untalan, an installation by sculptor Amy Ralston, and sound by Lesley Tao Mowat.

Sounding refers to a mechanism of probing the environment by sending out some kind of stimulus. The term comes from the ancient practice of determining the depth of water by feeding out a line with a weight at the end — making a sounding.

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